Engaging notes about data and analysis

I wanted to update everyone with news about a science conference website I have built: https://zerodivzero.com The website allows users to upload papers to their accounts and then search for science conferences to submit to. Keep track of all your acceptances, rejections, reviews and comments from your profile page. The site is fairly new and …

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In 1938 the United States set the federal minimum wage at 25 cent an hour. Since then, the minimum wage has been making small discrete jumps to today’s rate of $7.25 an hour. But after adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage has been decreasing ever since the peak value (in today’s dollars) on February 1968 at $11.09 per hour. The lowest …

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Following the suggestion of a reader, I re-plotted the worldwide minimum wage vs. unemployment. Before you skip ahead to the chart below, keep in mind the lesson I learned from my last post which was that international economies are vastly different from America’s, and examining the extremes doesn’t translate easily back to American circumstances. In the …

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The minimum wage rate is one of the polarizing points between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties point to studies claiming that raising the minimum wage will either increase inflation, negating the benefits, or it will lead to stronger purchasing power among the poorest consumers, improving the economy. Both sides make strong points. And into this confusing fray, I throw my own …

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This is an update to my previous blog post wherein I concluded that the optimal exercise window was from 5 am to 10 am (from an air quality stand point). In this post, I review the corrected data and received some advice which narrowed the window to 5 am to 7 am… Less than a week …

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I am a night time runner. It’s completely impossible for me to get out for my 5 mile run before my kids are tucked in bed and asleep. Being a night time runner has some unexpected perks — namely, it’s never too overbearingly hot to run and, most of the time, the rains magically …

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What does “the Internet” look like geographically? Recently, I wondered where the world’s IP addresses were physically located. I thought that getting the answer to this question would be a 5 minute project, but it turns out that for a network novice such as myself there was a little learning curve. By the end of …

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I bumped into Fermat’s Last Theorem the other day, probably the most famous margin note in history: Where , , and are all positive integers. The equation has no solutions for . But the theorem always constrains , and to be positive. Why? Here’s what I found plugging in and scenarios into the formula. First, …

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This post is related to NPR’s Planet Money’s podcast “Episode 472: The One-Page Plan To Fix Global Warming“. In the podcast, Alex Blumberg and David Kestenbaum describe their approach to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the chief cause of global warming. Their one step approach is to tax emissions. It’s an interesting podcast, well worth the …

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For a moment, suspend fairness to honest, prudent homeowners. Forget about providing “correct” market incentives. And disregard any other emotional or political problems that accompany this particular idea. It is widely agreed that the “Great Recession of 2006” was caused by the failing of mortgage-backed securities. So it seems like a simple approach to restoring normalcy …

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Playing with Google Trends led me to a mystery. If you look up search trends for “women’s rights”, “feminist” or “feminism”, the trend is downward. Down a whopping 70% since 2005 (I’m not really sure what is causing this trend, perhaps it will be the subject of a future post). But oddly enough, there are …

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Prompted by a comment from my earlier post on Google search trends vs. stock price, I applied the same technique to a handful of small-cap Russell 2000 companies. That is to say, I overlaid the stock price with the number of Google search trends since 2005 and then calculated the correlation. Trawling through this list …

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I recently wondered if Internet searches for companies correlate with the company’s stock price. A few years ago a researcher at Google was able to track flu trends by monitoring online searches for flu symptoms. Would searches translate to stock price as well? To answer the question, I used Google’s “trends” utility and Google’s finance …

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It was brought to my attention that a useful result for image analysis of the alphabet would be to demonstrate a method that identifies the alphabet letters and numbers as part of a computer vision project. Best and worst fonts for FFT analysis Certainly there are a huge array of metrics one could derive to …

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I spent some time taking a look at what can be revealed by an image analysis of the letters of the alphabet. The results were insightful and a little bit surprising. I started the analysis small, looking at the individual letters of the alphabet. Then I moved on to applying the same techniques to the …